There was nothing lazy about our Sloth Day celebrations - Susan Morrison

For those unfamiliar, sloths are a Neotropical group of xenarthran mammals constituting the suborder Folivora, including the extant arboreal tree sloths. God bless Wikipedia.

Atty, Scotland’s first-ever baby sloth, and his mum Fe have celebrated World Sloth Day at Edinburgh Zoo with a tasty floral treat while Atty's dad Nico took a nap

Edinburgh Zoo must have been a riot of sloth-based shenanigans. It’s home to an entire family of two-toed sloths. Feira and Nico are mum and dad to Scotland’s first ever baby sloth, proudly named Attenborough, after the great man himself. Helpfully, the zoo page explains that the slightly greenish tinge of their brown fur is because algae actually grows on them, and this “attracts small insects to live on their bodies”.

Don’t know about you, but I find that faintly alarming, mainly because we have a toy sloth in a box downstairs. We got it when we bought our rather expensive suite from a company that seemed to think that having shelled out a small fortune on carefully chosen soft furnishings, our living room really needed a naff cuddly toy. Now that I know some are awash with green slime and tiny creepy-crawlies, I’ll think twice before giving that plushy sloth a squeeze.

Ours is not for hugging anyway. My husband decided there was a chance that it might become a collectors item, and has carefully stowed it away until the day dawns when he can rock up to the Antiques Roadshow with his perfectly preserved specimen.

I imagine International Sloth Day is a fairly low-key affair. Not really raving party animals, yer ‘Choloepus hoffmanni’. They leave that to the chimpanzees. The very name comes from the word ‘sloth’, meaning lazy. Harsh, but understandable. They sleep about 15 hours a day. Even when they are awake, it's difficult to tell the difference. Very like teenagers, in my experience. Mind you, our two-toed friends are smarter. Those little insects caught in the green sludge of their fur are sloth snacks. Not for them the arduous trip to the fridge, fraught with the danger of being confronted by an adult who might try to have a conversation with them.

There are three-toed ones, in case you wondered. And long ago, there were giant ones. The extinct ‘Megatherium americanum’ weighed in at a strictly non-cuddly three tonnes. Seems to have been a big, lumbering, elephant-sized beast that wandered about chewing up the American landscape. They’ve got something like that at the moment, but elections might soon render that one extinct too.

To be honest, not sure the laid back sloths are aware of the honour of having their very own day, one of 218 days recognised by the United Nations. Given that there’s only 356 days a year, we’ll soon be hitting capacity. Each of these days, I guess, is to raise awareness, although why soccer needs a ‘World Football Day’ (May 25) when it's got a shedload of actual months to itself is a bit of a mystery. It doesn’t always work. January 28 is the ‘International Day of Peaceful Coexistence’, a date that gets even less attention than the big Day of The Sloths.

This year, however, International Sloth Day worked its magic on me. I feel like Scrooge at the end of A Christmas Carol. From here on in, October 20 will always be SlothFest in this house, greenish algae, bugs and all.